Burningbird
Moon River, wider than a mile
I’m crossing you in style some day
You dream maker
You heartbreaker
Wherever you’re going
I’m going your way.
Two drifters off to see the world
There’s such a lot of world to see
We’re after the same rainbow’s end
Waitin’ round the bend
My Huckleberry friend
Moon River and me.
as performed by Audrey Hepburn in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”
Cold-hearted orb that rules the night
Removes the colours from our sight,
Red is grey and yellow white
But we decide which is right
And which is an illusion.
From “Morning Glory” and “Late Lament”, Graeme Edge, Moody Blues “Days of Future Passed”
Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
Taking a vacation from weblogging should mean not reading weblog entries, as well as not writing them. Otherwise something’s going to pop up and engage your attention, and your writing vacation is over.
Mark Pilgrim wrote a application that tracks changes for Scripting News, which he calls Winer Watch. It grabs Dave Winer’s RSS feed and annotates changes between each iteration – color coded for deletions, changes, and additions.
I understand why Mark wrote this. Anyone that’s tangled with Winer knows how he will write something vicious, and then later delete it or edit it – after the damage has been done. Remember when Jonathon Delacour came up with a term for this? PullingDoing a Dave?
I can understand, but I cannot agree or approve.
Two days I ago I wrote When Reality and Virtuality Meet and Clash, and it wasn’t long after I wrote it that I pulled it. However, by that time, Aquarion had already responded to it, so I re-posted it.
I pulled the posting originally because of that tiny little blurb at the end of the posting, the one that reads:
As for me, I was also offered a ‘real world’ opportunity from another weblogger that I had to, regretfully, decline. The circumstances just didn’t work out; too many barriers – health, timing, and economics – in the way.
The reason why is that the person I had to disappoint was more than disappointed – they were angry and responded accordingly. “Wish you hadn’t said you could do it,” they wrote. “if you weren’t pretty sure you would.”
This upset me a great deal because my reasons for having to pull out of the opportunity are very good ones, and ones I would much rather not have. I felt kicked while I was down, and I wrote accordingly. In fact, if you checked the site yesterday, I edited this posting and I added and edited comments, until I finally decided – what’s the use? If the person can’t understand that shit happens, this won’t change no matter what I say.
(edit On reflection, I can see the frustration – my inability to follow through on the committment did cause inconvenience and difficulties. But it still goes back to – shit happens.)
During these edits, I also wrote some stuff about my life that I didn’t want online, and should not have published. However, I’m also a) hot-headed, b) impulsive, and c) a real fast typist. Yes, I know the Internet is unforgiving and rarely forgets, but the Internet usually doesn’t persist anything that’s existed less than an hour. I pulled the material.
I’m not a professional journalist, and this isn’t a professional publication. This weblog is a way for me to try new things, and to share some of it with you. This includes my writing, my use of technology, my photographs, and, yes, my life. To make it easier for you all to follow the effort and discuss it, with me and others, I follow certain formatting criteria – publish in reverse chronological order and provide permalinks, trackback, and comments.
But there is no law that says, “Thou shalt not make a mistake”. There is no law that says, “Thou shalt not edit”. If there were, I wouldn’t have any interest in continuing here. I do this out of love and interest, not to become rich and famous and find true love. Hardly. I’m broke, a B-lister, and all the good guys are taken, not interested, too young, or gay. Or all four.
Once this stops becoming an act of love, once it stops being fun or positive – why continue?
Editing material substantially after the fact should not be a frequent activity, true. Potentially, you’re leaving orphaned discussions, within comments and other weblog posts. Additionally, writing something deliberately vicious only to pull it, just as deliberately, an hour later after the damage is done is morally reprehensible. But so is doing something that literally takes away the weblogger’s right to change their mind – to make an edit or add and pull material. This is, in effect, punishing a person for making a mistake, or for being impulsive. For writing. For publishing online. For being human.
Don Park wrote on this issue at his weblog. What’s particularly disturbing is the number of people who see this as nothing more than a technical or legal issue. What about the morality of this act?
What about allowing a person to have some say in what persists of their writing? No, don’t come to me and say that with Google cache and things like the Wayback Machine, there’s no control anyway, because that’s a cop out answer. None of these technologies is going to capture changes, highlight them, and do so every five minutes. None of these technologies will most likely catch the error in judgement or in grammar that was corrected within the hour. And none of these operate with deliberate intent to cause harm. Tracking changes such as this – what is positive about this? What can possibly be positive about this?
When someone says something vicious, the best place for it is gone. Off the page, off the Net. If a person writes vicous things on a regular basis and pulls them, then stop reading them. If they don’t pull them, stop reading them. Just walk away. Ignore them.
I wrote in a comment at Don Park’s that if Mark had done something like this with me, I would quit weblogging. I would quit it in a moment. When we go so far in our quest for ‘public accountability’ that we no longer allow webloggers to make edits or changes without embarrassing them, then we’ve formed ourselves into a police force, and that’s just one step away from censorship. What is the good of this medium if it’s used for such petty means? What’s the good of the medium when we ignore the morality of an act, using technical capability and lack of copyright violation as justification?
Jeneane from Allied wrote me an email yesterday. I know she won’t mind me repeating the gist of what she said. “We used to have fun in weblogging”, she wrote.
We used to have fun in weblogging. I need to hang with the technical weblogging circles a lot less, or find ones that still have fun.
Update Continued here.
I have other things I have to focus on now.
Now that the co-op server is working well on its own, I’m going to take my long overdue break. Back before end of summer I hope.
Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
During my brief contract earlier this summer, a jarring moment occurred when I walked up to one of the people I worked with and saw that he was reading my weblog. I’ve never had such an obvious mix of the ‘real’ world and this virtual world before, and I found it uncomfortable. He’s a very likable person, friendly and personable and now a budding weblogger – but it was still a moment that stopped me dead in my tracks.
I don’t encourage my friends to read my weblog, though they are welcome especially if it helps me maintain contact with them. However, I don’t talk about it with my family, and hope that they’re too busy to check up on what I’m writing.
When I went back to San Francisco this last trip I had kind invitations for lunch and fireworks, from a fellow Wayward Weblogger as well as Marc Cantor, but the trip was a difficult one for me, and I wasn’t ready at that point to bridge the real and virtual. I will be, soon, and am planning on taking a few road trips later this summer to meet webloggers who live close by, as well as, hopefully, getting the interest of a few folks to stop by St. Louis this fall for the Open Aire Conference. Well, those folks who are on this continent and can therefore make it that is. I’d also like to attend a few of the St. Louis Bloggers get togethers, though I’m a bit shy of gatherings. Odd as this may seem to people from my obvious in your face style of writing, I’m rather a quiet person in ‘real’ life.
There’s that real/virtual life dichotomy again. I’m frankly envious of those who can mix the two so easily and effortlessly – you see their pictures out and about, hugging this person or that, attending gatherings and shmoozing with other webloggers. More, they not only tell friends and family about their weblogs, they encourage them to get involved with one of their own.
However, I have a strong suspicion that those people who write weblogs read by spouses, kids, and employers tend to write differently then people like me who are, for all intents and purposes, obscured from view because we’ve kept the two worlds far apart.
We’ve all seen webloggers who have pulled postings because they made family members unhappy. We’ve heard about people who have lost their jobs or been reprimanded for talking about their professional lives, even their personal lives online. We’ve also heard about the people who have met their spouses and close friends through online connections. This isn’t necessarily new. But what about the opposite?
What happens when someone’s real world breaks into the virtual? For instance, your sister, wife, mother, brother, son, husband starts dropping comments in your weblog or other weblogs? If it’s difficult at times to separate the real from the virtual in your weblog writing, how much more so is it when bits of that reality appear here and there, like scattered fluff from a dandelion?
Of course, if the ‘real’ person is integrated as part of the environment, and by this I mean introduced and encouraged to participate, as well as supportive of the weblogger’s efforts online, the mix of real and virtual works smoothly. For instance, there’s a certain man of faith who has gracefully and graciously bridged the gap between real and virtual with family, friends, and co-workers.
However, there have been times when I have made comments in other weblogs, and have been surprised and discomfited by the nature of responses made by the weblogger’s family and friends. Not recently, not often, but it has occurred a few times in the past. It jarred just as much as rounding that corner and seeing a co-worker reading my weblog.
The easy rapport that I had shared with the weblogger – the friendship I had assumed – was put into perspective. The associated to the weblogger by the real world responder was saying that no matter how much I may connect with the person, it will never be the same as the connection that person shares with ‘real’ people. With ‘real’ family. With ‘real’ friends.
But I am a real person. Even a real friend, though the connection is virtual. Not family, true. But I am a real person.
There are other times when the ‘real’ person disagrees with a weblog post made by their loved one, or with other weblog postings and comments, even to the point of seeming hostility. These leave you confused as you’re not sure how to react. You want to respond in kind, but then you remember your association with the weblogger and you hold back. Or you don’t, and then you worry if the weblogger will get upset because you just slammed their husband/wife/son/daughter/boss.
You might choose to stay silent, or be tempted to email the weblogger privately asking ‘permission’ to respond freely. Worse, you ask the weblogger what the ‘real’ person’s problem is, as if they’re accountable for this other person’s actions.
You also might wonder if the ‘real’ person resents the weblogger’s time spent within this medium, their associations they’ve made. Are their comments arising from interest, or as part of an effort to ‘punish’ the weblogger? Is it unfair to even consider this? Yes, it is actually. All of it.
We shouldn’t allow a person’s relationship with a weblogger to impact how we respond to them. If we do, then we’re just denying that weblogger the right to have their place in this virtual world. Conversely, we need to be able to respond to that weblogger as we want without being jumped on my the weblogger’s friends and family. Unfortunately, this one is less easy. I know this from personal experience, too.
Speaking of online friends, I wanted to congratulate Sheila Lennon getting married. I enjoyed reading about the experience and the cake and the plans and tired but radiant joy that lit her words. I wished I could have been there, licking the cake crumbs from my fingers at the celebration, but my best wishes are no less ‘real’ for not being there.
My good friend, and fellow Wayward Weblogger Chris is looking at new opportunities, which could be taking him to some pretty exotic ports of call. I wish him the best of luck with his decisions and his moves.
I also want to extend deepest sympathy to Jeff Ward at the loss of his father.
As for me, I was also offered a ‘real world’ opportunity from another weblogger that I had to, regretfully, decline. The circumstances just didn’t work out; too many barriers – health, timing, and economics – in the way.
